Author: harold

what is this

What makes these issues worse is that the patches themselves aren’t meaningful. Apex Legends has only had about three total balance patches or adjustments outside of bug fixes and almost all of them have been nerfs. Two months after release, Apex has added just one new character and one new gun. Fortnite’s v8.10 patch had three major balance changes, reworked the game’s vending machines — an important way to get loot — and added a new vehicle along with reworked animations for healing.

1. Journalists have so much bad faith. I know, it’s business. That’s also why that career means less than ever.

2. Making multiplayer, fast-paced computer games with millions of people playing through a large variety of machine is an insanely complex task. Respawn is a small developer to tackle this and they’re doing amazing. That’s why they’re going slow. Focused.

3. The race to bottomless content is unrealistic and stupid: first it’s not economically sustainable, even for Epic. Second, pushing for novelty as incentive to do anything is so bad for culture and game culture! You can enjoy something that’s been cooked days ago. A music album that’s 21 years old. An 800-year-old cathedral. But not with computer games. We have to stop this.

4. The battle for audience and the winner-takes-all approach that everyone looks forward to, is our demise. Every. Single. Time.

It’s exhausting, that’s what it is.

Me Myself&I

Death by Clip

Los Angeles basketball fans in shambles right now. On one hand, the Lakers, one of the biggest franchise in sports history. Hasn’t done anything great in over five years.

On the other hand, the Clippers who just beat the 2-time NBA champions by coming back from a 31-pt deficit on the road. The biggest come back in the playoffs ever. It’s not clear how the rest of the series will go but hell, that shit is unbelievable. This team led by their two sixth men has so much heart, it’s beautiful to watch. Lou Williams is the best #23 in town. Mad props.

Meanwhile I’m still super impressed with Kevin Looney this year. This mofo looked like a tree trunk at the start of the season and now he’s a Boogie lite, scoring at will in the paint, agile, smart. It’s ridiculous.

Fuckin’ Boban making it rain from midrange, hello? That’s going to be huge for the Sixers. The Nets are still a danger, with all this heart of theirs. Once again, the battle between being an underdog and the favorite is one of the best.

Spurs at Nuggets tonight. Let’sgooooo

Me Myself&I

Nipsey

Post author By harold
Post date April 3, 2019
No Comments on Nipsey

Turning left on Slauson from the top of the hill is always a little thrilling. There, the city expands. More of that suburban sprawl pigmented with tall palm trees that I love so much. Those 50s buildings and colorful low-rise. Proud black people nodding, smiling, hustling. There, I drive down to Crenshaw where I make a right to Inglewood.

I’ve been sitting at that corner’s traffic light many, many times. I was supposed to be there on Sunday afternoon. It didn’t happen, too much biking that week.

I was hearing more and more about Nipsey. I didn’t know he was that invested in the neighborhood.

It’s always hard and personal to see black men die when they’re trying and achieving so much, from nothing.

The stakes are very high on this corner of the city. Property, real estate. New fucking development.

As predicted, the case makes no sense. It has nothing to do with gang rivalry. It might be pure toxic masculinity. Men can go and kill others for no damn reason. We see that everyday, sadly. Killing someone that much loved around is an automatic death sentence on yourself, though. You can be dumb as hell and understand that, even in the heat of a stupid argument.

Last night Russ dropped a 20-20-21 stat line –an absurdly hard feature- over the LA Lakers, dedicated it to his friend. Overwhelming.

The work continues. Always.

Audio&Games

Sad Anthem

If you have a loot-oriented multiplayer online game, it’s little use having an in-depth story or environmental story telling because the majority of players are just going to be “could you hurry the hell up so we can get to the end boss and the loot drop!?”

it seems obvious, isn’t it? A decision needed to be made right there. It seems like big game companies executives still don’t get that gameplay is everything, and always will. And that top-down design, on massive games like Anthem, is a no-no.

On the other hand, EA has Apex Legends. All about gameplay and, for some reason, is really successful.

If Bioware closes soon, we’ll know why.

So much waste. It’s just sad.

Audio&Games

Separating gameplay from aesthetic

Post author By harold
Post date March 26, 2019
No Comments on Separating gameplay from aesthetic

I am more and more convinced that tool/engine/gameplay should be made by a different company/team than the one doing the aesthetic/theme/narrative.

This way the whole game hits a wide spectrum of gamers with the perfect combo: investment in the game and enjoyment of the experience, 100%. Right in the chest.

Think Overland (the indie game) with an Atlanta-ish vibe and a more narrative-oriented game. I would buy the fuck out of that (I already have Overland but I feel its theme is kinda bland).

Counter-Strike with a paintball and women athletes skin, for a more than welcome change from the terrible narrative the original game conveys. The maps are 20 year old maps. Still played. That game is good. The theme is gross.

X-COM2 with a TV show theme: L-World and Shameless and Weeds and the fucking Tudors, I don’t know. All of them could come out and fans would jump on them. To each his own, and probably more attractive to most people than the weird, generic 90s X-Files, very limited, theme that this great game has.

Etc.

Maybe there would be a new role, some kind of game development A&R thing to match gameplay and “dressing”. I’d love to do that. I’d be good at it. It’d be like modding, only official and professional.

We should as developers seriously think about that kind of things. It’s not *that* hard technically speaking –leaving things open for another team to populate- but it does mean having an extremely stable production process. Very clear tools and very technical folks. Which is still something rare in game development.

Audio&Games

Walled gardens kill

On another subject with the same online problem:

Many of the best games ever released on the App Store now only exist in reviews or YouTube videos we published.

These games are effectively lost forever.

(not totally, I’m sure some people have them on old devices and raw images on hard drives). The problem remains.

The fact that we lose things online is dramatic and stupid because:

– We always thought this would never happen. If costs (storage, bandwidth) were a problem in 2000, they’re not in 2019. It’s a whole lot of laziness and control by the big brands in the game and a lack of culture preservation in the developer community.

– Computers are so resilient. Software flows. We can run code anywhere. We can run Doom on a doorbell or Half-Life on a 3DS. Code can always be translated, virtualized or decoded. It absolutely doesn’t have to be the way of not being able to run anything from a device to another.

So it’s dramatic because it’s only because folks (at Apple, Facebook, overall developers) not thinking about the long-term and past history. It’s not about technology. It’s about us focusing on the short term, the next hit.

It demonstrates that far too many developers don’t and didn’t make games for anything but using new tech, make a bit of money and maybe go viral, instead of trying to build something that lasts. Some games did badly 5 years ago but maybe they would benefit from a re-release with more polish and be successful today. That happens all the time in other fields. Putting out great products is hard, it’s not crazy to try multiple times. Consumers don’t mind at all, they even sometimes absolutely love it.

But for that, you need to foster legacy and a sense of continuum in the medium. We’re not doing that at all.

Music

Keep your music offline

MySpace just lost 12 years worth of music. It’s quite unprecedented. It’s also scary and sad. There probably was some excellent stuff in those 50 million songs from 14 million artists.

I’ve always been on the fence with uploading my music to services. I am slowly getting back to sharing directly. I don’t trust any of the services we have out there. Even when paying. Even when they’re big.

MySpace used to be gigantic. It is now clear that those companies don’t care for a second about people’s creations.

Peter has a great comment:

This isn’t just about individual backups, but the larger question of how digital music is distributed archived in our society. And reflecting on this it’s actually pretty stunning to me how far *backwards* we’ve gone.

Just a few things to consider:

1. While P2P stuff like torrent and Napster may have been illegal, one thing about distributing music that way is that the content then exists more than one place. By comparison, corporate consolidation means we have very little real redundancy. With or without the blockchain business, *any* distributed scheme for content would work very differently.

2. This isn’t just about data reliability, either – it’s also about uptime. If we’re overly dependent on one provider, like Facebook, an outage or your government deciding to put up a firewall or that provider false flagging a copyright claim – any of those things can be utterly devastating, say, if you’re an independent artist/label trying to make a release date work.

3. There’s no library. When I got started, I was advised to register copyright for my scores to the US government, and eventually audio, too. That means the US Library of Congress archives those works and makes them available to researchers and so on. Not to mention, I grew up checking out tapes and CDs from the local library. Now this ‘cloud’ business means things are lost and inaccessible.

I could go on. Backups are important, but a backup isn’t a public archive, which is why the Internet Archive reference is relevant.

Creators are careless and consumers have no sense of legacy or continuation anymore. A pretty awful equation.

Me Myself&I

Ball

Post author By harold
Post date March 23, 2019
No Comments on Ball

The NBA is rigged, there’s no other way. How come you have a perfect ending like that for the Lakers: The point guard they traded a few years ago comes back with his team and they nail the coffin, eliminating the Lakers from the playoffs, while the new leader, LeBron, slips on the floor on one of the last possession that could have changed the game.

It couldn’t have been a better spectacle, a more dramatic end. If the game isn’t rigged, it sure looks like it is sometimes.

Harden. Jesus. It’s like I want to love that lefty but I can’t love that lefty. The flopping is so absurd. 17 fucking free throws last night, as much as the entire Spurs team. It’s just so ridiculous. It’s not fun to watch. The Spurs came back from a 19-pt deficit to lose on BS like that. One day he has 57 points and loses, the next he has 61 and barely wins. That means that team is so dependent on him, if he goes down they lose every single game until he goes back on the court.

Shout out to the Spurs though. Players are progressing. 9 wins in a row ain’t bad at all. The defense is back to suffocating mofos left and right. GOOD. Hopefully they get Denver in the first round. They can do it.

Can’t wait for the playoffs. DeMar, please activate that Gear Fourth shit soon brother.

Me Myself&I

Plot twist

It does not happen.

It was interesting to read Nicole’s take on family and I guess adoption is really different for a woman. Having the physical possibility to host Life. It shifts how you envision family. Believing in God’s will also add a twist.

As a young man, black, atheist and adopted, I am not in this situation. I have to build and believe in everything I build.

I need a breather.

Me Myself&I

It was diffrnt 4 me

The strange thing was that, inside, I always felt I was the same as everyone around me. I am just like you, I thought when kids squinted at me in mockery of my own eyes; why can’t you see that? When I was young I certainly felt more like a white girl than an Asian one, and sometimes it was shocking to catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror and be forced to catalog the hated differences.

Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know.

Nicole was adopted and I’m reading her memoir. This is so wild to me.

I never felt like wanting to be white like everyone around me. Never. My first hero or at least the first that I remember was Space Sheriff Gavan, an Asian hero in an Asian world.

So there I was, a black kid in a white village, adulating an Asian fictional character. I guess the idea of conformation, to be like everyone around simply didn’t exist in my mind: there are human beings. We have different shapes. The end. It seemed like the purest truth.

This idea fit me, singled out as I was. It was reasonable, stuck in reality and allowed myself to exist without thinking that something was wrong with me. I’ll take that.

What hurts reading that part is that Nicole was so not used to diversity that she couldn’t do anything but envy her white friends. There was immediately a hierarchy to her. It seems so toxic. It scares me to read the rest and her interactions with black folks, if that happens at some point.